Conservation of Big Stuff at the Henry Ford: Past, Present and Future

Conservation of Big Stuff at The Henry Ford: past, present and future Clara Deck The Henry Ford “Henry Ford never does things by halves.” H.B. Morton (1934) Henry Ford was a Michigan farm boy who became one of the most successful industrialists of the 20th century. Most people know of the man who founded the Ford Motor Company and put America on wheels with his Model “T”. Those interested in the history of technology are still awed by the achievement of his immense industrial complex on the River Rouge that transformed raw materials into completed cars. Born on a typical Michigan farm in 1863, Ford could not leave the farm fast enough as a youth. He eventually became a steam engineer at the Edison Illuminating Company in Detroit and began experimenting with the internal combustion engine and producing automobiles. Later in life he loved nothing better than to play with old farm machinery and steam engines. With the great success of his Model “T” assembly line, Ford had the time and resources to indulge in a hobby that eventually grew to epic proportions. With some of his millions he acquired millions of artifacts. Dozens of men, collectors and restorers, were employed by Ford to support his obsession. He accumulated buildings and the furniture to outfit them, as well as all description of technological antiques from clocks to sewing machines. But nothing is a better measure of his collecting passion than the Big Stuff: not only hundreds of British and American steam engines, but also enough machine tools to outfit three working machine shops in Greenfield Village and then some. He also acquired about a dozen airplanes and a considerable number of railroad locomotives and rolling stock, not to mention fire engines and horse drawn vehicles. This required him to make a decision: where to keep it all? In the same year that his Ford Motor Company made the well-orchestrated production change of the old Tin Lizzy “T” for the brand new Model “A” automobile, he turned a low-lying area of his airfield into his own vision of a museum. Stories of Henry Ford’s personal interaction with his historical collection offer an insight into his restoration philosophy and his idiosyncratic notions of history. He worked with agents who found wondrous relics and supervised their transformations to his own idea of beauty. All this effort eventually led to the idea of a new kind of museum: a twelve-acre museum building and an historic Village containing houses and businesses, but especially structures that could exhibit working machines showing his favorite industrial processes. It was a vast Illustration of Man's Great Technological Progress that he called The Edison Institute. (The complex eventually became known as Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield 1 Village but more recently adopted the name “The Henry Ford” to encompass the whole “history attraction” which now includes a recently revived Rouge factory tour.) Yet his ultimate vision for the collections themselves was so personal and eccentric that after Ford died it became difficult to sustain and especially to augment on the scale Ford must have envisioned. The large technology objects at The Henry Ford today present unusual conservation challenges not simply due to the scale and complexity of the objects themselves but also because of the collector's own priorities and peculiar approach to exhibiting them in the first place. Our solutions to these challenges in a growing and ever evolving History Attraction must be as innovative and bold as our founder’s vision yet must also be rooted in an ethical framework that sustains the objects themselves. Founding of the Edison Institute (Now The Henry Ford) On October 21 1929, three days before the Black Thursday stock market crash, hundreds of visiting dignitaries including President Hoover and Thomas Alva Edison helped Henry Ford inaugurate his Edison Institute. Ford’s guests rode in historical horse drawn vehicles in the pouring rain through the mud of a Greenfield Village, still very much under construction. A candle-lit banquet inside the museum was finally lit once Edison dramatically reenacted the lighting of his first carbon filament lamp on its fiftieth anniversary. Edison performed the ceremony in the reconstructed version of his own Menlo Park Laboratory. The complex was Ford’s great tribute to his hero and it was remade complete with machine shop, steam engine and outbuildings that had been saved from destruction and shipped to Dearborn along with three traincar-loads of red New Jersey soil. It was the official opening of Ford’s dearest dream: his “Hall of Technology” and his Greenfield Village, the Museum that would “tell the story of man’s technological and cultural progress through comprehensive displays of inventions and artifacts” and the Village that would illustrate “early American life and show how the artifacts were used” (Upward, 1979). Work had begun in 1927 on what has been dubbed “America’s first theme park” (Lacey). It was Henry Ford’s grand retirement project, his work-in-progress throughout the 1920s and thirties and into the 1940s. This was the same year that the Ford Motor Company finally shut down Model “T” production and introduced the new Model “A” (Lacey). As many as 60,000 workers were laid off by the Ford Motor Company that year, awaiting the re-tooling for a re-design that was promoted with unprecedented fanfare. Henry Ford had given up the Presidency of the Ford Motor Company, already a worldwide conglomerate, to his son Edsel way back in 1918. Ford finally had the luxury of time and access to a talented pool of his own Ford Motor Company employees to assign work; he imagined himself a master. He had time to travel to Britain on frequent antique shopping 2 sprees where he collected almost everything his heart fancied, including some of the most ancient relics of the Industrial Revolution. Ford’s vision for the establishment of a whole institute had really been born out of his eventually unruly penchant for amassing old stuff. His antique collecting had begun many years before upon his initial success with Model T around 1905. Starting with farm machinery like threshers and implements, he eventually accumulated the quintessential collection of American portable and traction engines. In the early 1920s he used his old Port Huron traction engine to help in the construction of his own residence in Dearborn, which he called Fair Lane. He asked employees to demonstrate an “old-time” engine and thresher team at the Michigan State fair (Ford Motor Company Archives – Mr Roy Shumann). Ford also amassed roomfuls of rather small stuff: “Edisoniana”, phonographs, music boxes, firearms and fiddles. One of the objects he scoured the country for early on was the very agricultural traction engine he had operated as a young man (Lacey). He filled up his office, and used an area behind his new engineering laboratory, called Building 13, to sort his objects and prioritize restoration projects (Upward 1979). By 1924 there were carloads of antiques arriving to tractor Building 13 near Ford Engineering lab -- freight-train carloads (Ford Motor Company Archives – Mr Roy Shumann). Many objects Ford did not want or that he considered duplicate were simply scrapped from Building 13 (Ford Motor Company Archives – Mr Peter York). We have no idea how many were scrapped, but we hope that the best was retained. Soon he developed an interest in restoring historic buildings, starting with a couple of Inns out east and his own childhood home. His interest in farm machinery, industrial production and electrical equipment soon outpaced the room he had to keep it in. The idea for the Institute grew out of his interest in the collections. We can marvel at Henry Ford’s enormous enterprise that restored these huge collections. Finding and refurbishing antiques occupied increasing amounts of his time after he gave up the helm of the Ford Motor Company to his son Edsel in 1918. Although no one before the 1970s thought it necessary to record the particulars of any restoration, we can piece together part of the story from the artifacts themselves and from the reminiscences of Ford’s former employees. Many anecdotes of his visits to restoration projects under way in the Village attest to the acute interest he had in works in progress. A born tinkerer according to his own favorite personal legend, he needed to be present as his men worked to fulfill his dream of elevating technological contrivances to their proper glory. So he supervised restorations personally. Evidence of Ford’s own approach to restoration can be seen in the remainders of these gigantic collections still at The Henry Ford. A series of oral histories conducted with former employees and acquaintances of Henry Ford in the mid -1950s reveal some of Ford’s approach to the preservation of his collections. 3 Ford hired carpenters, cabinetmakers, machinists, die makers and steam-shovel operators to restore his collections. Much of the work on the wooden antiques, smaller domestic arts devices and machine tools was probably done in the Village after construction there began in 1927. There was also a team working on cars throughout the 1930s and 1940s who had only to “send to the Rouge” for parts, plating and bodywork whenever necessary. They restored about one or two cars per year. Dozens of steam traction engines, portable engine and stationary steam engines were restored in the Locomotive shop at the Rouge complex under a man named Bill Miller (Ford Motor Company Archives – Mr Ernest Foster). Any part they needed, no matter how large, could be designed, cast, machined and finished right on the premises.

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